Apple considered buying Bing: This may be the reason why the deal didn’t happen – Times of India

A day after a report suggested that Apple held talks with DuckDuckGo to replace Google as the default search engine, one of the top executives has claimed that the iPhone maker even considered buying Bing in 2018 but the deal with Microsoft wasn’t completed.
According to testimony from Apple’s head of machine learning John Giannandrea, who worked on Search at Google, Apple was considering using Bing instead of Google to return answers to some queries from Siri as well as power other iPhone and Mac features.
“Obviously, if we entered into a joint venture with Bing, it would have implications for the Google relationship,” Giannandrea said in his testimony, CNBC reported. Giannandrea also said he believed Apple CEO Tim Cook told Microsoft it wasn’t going forward.
The Apple executive’s testimony was a part of the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google, where the government is trying to prove that the search engine giant used licensing deals and other contracts to lock out rivals to monopolise the market. Google has denied any wrongdoing.
Cook may have met Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
Giannandrea said he believed that Cook had met with Nadella in 2018, which apparently resulted in internal discussions about whether Apple should increase its partnership with Bing. He also said that Adrian Perica, Apple’s head of business development, had met Microsoft that year.
“I would say that there was an open discussion about whether we could do more together, and that included, my understanding was, potentially the option to acquire Bing from Microsoft,” Giannandrea said.
Microsoft was ‘very flexible’
Microsoft had already suggested that it was willing to be “very flexible” with sharing revenue from its ads if the companies had struck a partnership.
Nadella, in his testimony, had revealed that Microsoft was ready to spend around $15 billion to become the default search engine in Apple’s devices. Microsoft was ready to spend to make Bing a more competitive product, he suggested.
But Giannandrea said Microsoft was interested in Apple paying for improvements to the search engine, including expanding it to additional international markets.
“One of the four options we looked at was a joint venture where Apple would have presumably provided some resources and they would have done some of these projects,” Giannandrea highlighted.
Why Apple chose to go with Google
Giannandrea suggested that he was somewhat sceptical of Bing’s pitch and sent an email to Cook in December 2018 explaining his reservations. He compared Bing and Google search in 2021 and found Google was significantly better at mobile queries.
“I said, ‘Is it possible that we could build a parity product?’ Yes, it’s theoretically possible, but I didn’t see a path to a better search engine for Apple’s users at that time,” Giannandrea added.
When probed why Apple didn’t invest in building its own search engine, and whether the company may have invested more heavily in its own search technology if it didn’t have a lucrative deal with Google, Giannandrea said he didn’t think Apple had a “general” search engine because it does not have a search results page.
He noted that building its own general search engine would have been an expensive undertaking.